schutze wrote:Thinking about "Reverse SEO" tactics ....
1. changing the names of galleries will interrupt years-old links around Internet from accessing my photos without using a passkey, right?
I can see where you're going with that, but I don't think that will work for you in this case. One of the really nice things about PBase is the way it does hierarchical galleries. And it is true that a "standard" site does use separate folders (directories) to implement a hierarchical structure. However PBase doesn't; it would be impossible to manage if it did. For example my Tuscany gallery sits under my Italy gallery, which sits under my root gallery. However from the viewer's point of view (including viewers who are indexing bots) the gallery page is just:
http://www.pbase.com/akmc_in_au/toscana_firenze; no mention of root, no mention of Italy. The "path" that represents my hierarchy is simply defined in the back end database as links between the various records that represent the galleries and images. So if I change the name of it (which I believe is just an alias to an ID code anyway, but that's neither here nor there) then the only thing that gets broken is the link to that specific gallery page. More importantly if I changed the name of the Italy gallery, that would not in any way affect the path to the Tuscany one (or its URL path) either.
More importantly still, if you look at the individual images you'll see that there is no reference to the gallery at all; it's just
http://www.pbase.com/image/{IDNumberOfImage}. The images are pulled straight from where they are in the database. This allows the images to be "in" multiple galleries at a time. (Though I never do that because there is one glitch in it; if a single image is in both gallery A and gallery B and a viewer is scrolling through gallery B they sometimes hit Next and find themselves redirected to gallery A.) That's is just an aside, though; the key point is that the search engines have indexed the path to the photo, and that path does not go through your galleries. Accordingly changing the name of the gallery does not affect the link path that has been stored by the search engine.
It's actually a pretty inspired piece of web design to be honest; it makes most of the links on PBase quite robust and less prone to the link rot that plagues companies who don't think more than 3 months ahead and reorganise their websites on a regular basis so that you can never get back to anything quickly. (I'm looking at you, Canon Australia.) Normally it works really, really well... but in an "outside the envelope" case like yours it has some downside since you actually
want your links to rot. Most people wouldn't.
schutze wrote:Can I change the account name with which I originally signed up with Pbase? (schutze)
I don't believe so. If you take a look on your Update Account page you'll see that it's not an editable field. You can change your
display name; for example I signed up as akmc_in_au but changed to "Alan K", but the path to my profile is still
http://www.pbase.com/akmc_in_au/profile. If you could change the name it could only be done by the PBase Admins and if they have that used as the actual key field in the table they may not be able to either.You can ask; whether you get a reply is a bit of random chance these days unfortunately.